University of Toronto Antisemitic Encampment & the University's Shocking Complicity

"[The University of Toronto encampment and accompanying anti-Israel movement] was not primarily a grassroots student protest."

"A slew of outside agitators, including faculty, health care workers, climate justice groups, labour activists, trade unionists, gay rights activists, socialists/Marxists and activists with local chapters [of] the Palestine Youth Movement and Samidoun [linked themselves with the 'People's Circle for Palestine']"

The Canary Mission report: University of Toronto Antisemitic Encampment & the University's Shocking Complicity 

"[There were numerous documented instances of overtly antisemitic statements, including:] "kike", "We need another Holocaust", "Jews belong in the sea Palestine will be free" "Death to the Jews", "Hamas for Prime Minister", "You dirty f--cking Jew", "Go back to Europe", and "Itbach El Yahood" ["slaughter the Jews"]."

Ontario Superior Court Judge Markus Koehnen

An anti-Israel tent encampment protesting the war in Gaza continues to stand at the University of Toronto campus on Tuesday May 7, 2024. (Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post)

 

Canary Mission, founded to document antisemitic and anti-Israel actions on the campuses of North American universities, has released a study of University of Toronto, concluding its administrators failed to respond while their campus was taken over by supporters of terrorism, organized by outside agitators. Dozens of U of T faculty were listed as supporters of the pro-Hamas demonstrations that characterized the activities of the encampment. On May 2nd, a group of protesters breached a fence, then occupied the King's College Circle courtyard for two months.

The fence was lined with posters celebrating the atrocities in southern Israel committed by Hamas operatives, calling for more violent uprisings both in Israel and in Canada as well. In their study and subsequent report, Canary Mission pointed out 153 professors, 123 employed by the university included, publicly gave their support to the encampment, while 45 of them took active participation and six delivered addresses to the gathering of antisemites bitterly condemning Israel's counterterrorism action in Gaza.

Concealing identities behind keffiyehs and medical masks, these were sociopathic thugs who acted to confine access to the occupied area where any who wished to enter were first forced to commit to agreeing with a number of statements that excluded 'Zionists' or Israel-sympathizers, much less Jews themselves from gaining access. The report's authors are scathing in their condemnation of the  university's administration which took no action to arrest the protest movement that posed a hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty.

The pathetic excuse given was a wish to avoid violence by confronting and attempting to dismantle the camp, much less enforce the university's own code of conduct. Nor did the university ever appear to address the issue of its own professors supporting the encampment. Some of whom have been identified as members of the university's chapter of Faculty for Palestine, credited in the report with forcing the administration to retreat from its threat of disciplining faculty members refusing to comply with the initial trespass notice.

The Faculty for Palestine complained that the university had ignored its responsibility to its own "supposed commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism and human rights", while they were themselves instrumental in denying those freedoms and respect for human rights while practising racism against the Jewish student body and faculty members. As well, many of the F4P members have involvement in the Hearing Palestine initiative at the university, "an intellectual hub at the University of Toronto that centres the study of Palestine and facilitates advanced interdisciplinary research on Palestine, past, present and future".

This is, of course, a Palestine of their imaginative choosing, linked with Arab Palestinians and de-linked from the primary presence of Palestinian Jews, when during the pre-Christian era of the Roman Occupation of the Middle East, the province known as Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina by the Roman administration. Its occupants were Jews. There never was a 'Palestine' dedicated to Arabs, not in the dim and distant past, not in the recent past, and not at the present time, other than an Arab co-opting of ancestral Judea.

The former encampment at the University of Toronto. Photo by Jesse Kline/National Post